Sublime

Pratt hired Gould to survey a tanning site, but was sufficiently impressed that he made him a partner and manager of the projected new tannery. So the pint-sized Gould, barely out of his teens, led fifty workmen into the woods and built virtually a full-scale town, including living and food service quarters, a mule-powered bark crushing plant and c

Charlie detests placer mining, the process of sifting through piles of sand for specks of gold. Instead, he applies his “big ideas from the big disciplines” to find the large, unrecognized nuggets of gold that sometimes lie in plain sight on the ground.

The practical methodologies evolved over many years, and were largely the work of John Hall, a gunsmith from Portland, Maine, and inventor of the “Hall carbine” that became notorious when muckrakers dug into the youthful Pierpont Morgan’s dealings with Civil War procurement authorities.

Lyda Judson Hanifan

Best-practice steam engine technology could have saved the equivalent of a quarter of labor costs at most plants. Inefficient furnaces were oxidizing away huge amounts of metal. The Germans were pulling ahead in the use of overhead belt conveyors. It was absurdly wasteful to support 119 rail-shape standards. Better management of furnace linings, mo

The Valley’s venture investors were typically Boston merchant princes, men such as Israel Thorndike, S. A. Eliot, Samuel Cabot, Francis Stanton, and Harrison Gray Otis. Edmund Dwight, a Morgan cousin on his mother’s side, wasn’t in the same financial stratum as a Cabot, but gained access through his work at the law firm of Fisher Ames, the old Mass

Hill even plowed $25,000 into the faltering New York Times. All across the GN empire, Jim Hill’s private car became a landmark, frequently only a mythical landmark, pulled up on sidings from Fargo to Olympia, Washington—there to dictate policy regarding rail regulation and other pressing issues. He was becoming a legend in his own time, an ogre to

How We Work and Why: Running a Precision Railroad, Volume